Chris Johnston

The social bookmarking web app Ma.gnolia.com is now out of beta. Everyone should give it a try. The interface is beautiful and the entire site is easy to use. They still have a few things to work out, but overall, it functions quite well. The best part is that the guys behind it seem genuinely open to suggestion. Now they are not going to implement them all, but if you send them an email, they do take the time to read it and to reply.

There is also an announcement up on Jeffrey Zeldman’s site as he had a hand in bringing the site to life.

Apparently, Google is working on getting some of the
Windows apps to run on Linux. They are reportedly doing this via Wine and CodeWeaver’s CrossOver Office. This means that when and if Picasa runs on Linux, it will not be a native port of the program. This will probably be a problem for some in the Linux community. Personally though, I think it is cool. Although, I still plan on moving to Mac and iPhoto.

Man, writing programs in C is hard. After working in Java for over two years, I am finding that getting my head back into writing C programs is taking a lot of work. Both of the comp sci courses that I am taking this semester require me to program in C. For the one course, I am doing X Windows programming and creating yet another flat file database. And for the other course, we are doing operating system type programming—semaphores, forks, pipes, filesystem stuff, etc.

I find that I have to go back to my reference books and relearn things like pointers, structs, and all the other basic C stuff. I know the knowledge is there, it is just a matter of reconstructing those neural pathways. Hopefully by the end of this weekend they will exist again.

Javalobby has an interesting discussion on the five books that every Java developer must own. Below are the books that I suggested:

• Head First Design Patterns – Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, and Kathy Sierra
• Pragmatic Programmer – Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
• Code Complete – Steve McConnell
• Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug
• Applying UML and Patterns – Larman

It is amazing how much agreement exists on this topic. Two books that I am going to add to my collection, based on the overwhelming support for them in the discussion, are:

• Effective Java
• Core Java 2, Volumes 1 and 2

I have been looking for a good Java reference book, and Core Java 2 looks like it is the one to pick.

I had a friend send me these two articles outlining rumours that Google is building its own internet using dark fiber and portable data centers in a box. I knew they were buying up dark fiber in the States, but apparantly they are doing it else where as well? I don’t want to speculate and spread rumours, but it will be interesting to see what happens over the next year. I don’t know, if I was Microsoft, I think I would be starting to get a little worried.

I thought I would post a little bit about two of the new web apps that I am a beta tester for:

• Ma.gnolia
• Newsvine

Ma.gnolia is a bookmarking site similar to del.icio.us. However, it does have some differences. The first being that it is an absolutely beautiful web app. The interface is just gorgeous. Unfortunately, it is still in Beta and they do not have an invite system. So you will have to sign up and hope that they pick you.

It is interesting with this site. At first, aside from the aesthetics, I wasn’t sure if I liked it. It did not seem as usable as del.icio.us and once your bookmarks in the site it is definitely a little harder to get at them. However, the more time I spend with it, the more I like. The site seems a little more grown up and I love seeing the list of newly added bookmarks on the right hand side.

One thing that Ma.gnolia does different to del.icio.us is their groups. Any member can create a group. Once a group exists you can add bookmarks to it. I have a group for Java Frameworks in which I add links to any site that is about a Java framework—Hibernate, Spring, Lucene, Tapestry, Wicket, etc. Then, if other people are interested in the group they can add bookmarks as well.

Another think that I really like is the rating system. Every link can be rated out of 5. This allows me to see really quickly what people think are good links and which ones are bad. However, right now, every link seems to be rated fairly high.

It does have some problems though. The biggest is probably the search capabilities. The two biggest are that when you do a straight search, it only searches the title and the description fields for the bookmarks. It does not search based on tags. To find all the links for a tag, you have to click on the Tag menu option and then click on the tag. This seems like one to many clicks to me. The other problem is that there is no way to search on multiple tags. So if you wanted to find all the links tagged with both Java and Tutorial you can’t. You would have to search for Java and then manually look for Tutorial. However, according to an email, they are working on this.

The second site is Newsvine. It is a news site (big surprise there, eh?). Unlike digg.com where users submit stories, Newsvine pulls its stories from the major news providers like Rueters. The upside of this is that you are getting real news and there is lots of it.

I have only been using Newsvine for a little bit, so there is not much that I can say so far. I heard about it from Ambermac’s podcast, Inside the Net. If you want more information, download the podcast and listen to an interview with Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine.

One thing that I have noticed is how university professors seem to get stuck in time. I am taking a course on distributed systems and networks and have to create two applications using X Windows. No CORBA, no SOAP, no Java RMI, instead we have to use X Windows and Motif.

It should be interesting to create the application and to create a cool GUI application, but X Windows? Is this not a technology that came out 20 years ago?